Snotty noses, earaches, and fever--Oh My!

Yesterday, DS11 began to feel a little chilled and said that his throat hurt a little bit. By dinner time, he had a fever of almost 102 with an earache that felt like "knives pushing in" and a terribly raw, sore throat.

Here we go again! I tried to give him some ibuprofen for the fever, but he barfed it right up. He cried and moaned all the way home from granny's house. We finally got him in a warm shower and he said that it felt good.

We dried out his ear canals with a little rubbing alcohol and followed it with 2 drops of CS that he held in his ear for about a minute (all he could handle). A few minutes later he said it might feel "a little better." Within about 20 minutes, he was sleeping like a baby. His face and body still felt very warm from fever and flushed, but his little ear was cool to the touch and a soft pink.

This morning, he woke up with a slight fever, no earache and only the sore throat and congestion. This time, he held 2 drops of CS in his ear for about 3 minutes while I massaged around his ear to help it go farther in. He is resting comfortably and we are waiting for the ENT to call us back with further instructions. I doubt he will be thrilled about the CS, but if he had been able to give us anything to solve the problem (ongoing since December), then I would have never been desperate/nervy enough to try it.

My mom still thinks that I am going to turn him into a smurf with the silver. She read a People Magazine article about a man in Minnesota who now looks, well, a lot like Papa Smurf. Of course, the article doesn't mention that he drank over 8 ounces per day of homemade (and not good quality) CS every day for 12 YEARS! So, it scares her to think that I am giving her precious grandson the same thing. Of course, I am giving him high quality, commercially prepared CS at the rate of about .5 teaspoons per day for less than a week. At this rate, if I buy really low quality CS, we are at least 50 years or so from smurfdom. That works for me, especially as I hope that we will finally be past this episode in our lives. I would hate to refer to his entire pre and teen years as "the sinus years."

Of course, some days, it feels like that is exactly what will happen.

Oh well, I'll just sit here and wait for the phone to ring...